WB govt plans crackdown to tackle chit fund scam

Saradha Group director Manoj Kumar Nagel being produced in Bidhannagar court on Sunday.

A day after the police seized Saradha Group chairman Sudipta Sen’s property and froze his bank accounts for duping thousands of people with his chit-fund money-trap, a PIL was filed in Calcutta high court petitioning the court to order a CBI enquiry into the Saradha Group.

Income Tax officials and Left MPs have also decided to nail all those involved with the dubious firm.

While the Income-Tax department is planning a major crackdown on a number of present and former directors of the group, MPs of the four Left parties will grill their Trinamool counterparts, especially Rajya Sabha member and Saradha’s media CEO Kunal Ghosh, on this issue.

The I-T crackdown, following instructions from the PMO and the finance ministry, will include suomotu cases against directors and top officials of the group.

I-T sources said former bureaucrats, IPS and bank officers, politicians and journalists would be grilled.

The preliminary probe will focus on disproportionate assets. “We’ll probe how the personal assets of some directors and officials bulged suddenly to an abnormal extent in the past three years, especially after they came in touch with the group,” an income-tax official said.

The second area of probe will be the foreign tours by the directors and top officials of the firm, especially on allegations that Rs.9 crore were spent on the foreign tours of a scribeturned-politician, who held an influential position in the group’s media business.

The final aspect of the investigations will be the extravagant parties hosted or sponsored by the Saradha Group from time to time in India and abroad.

“We’ll quiz the directors and top officials to know how much money was spent on such parties,” the official said.

On the political front, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members of the four Left parties — CPI(M), CPI, RSP and All India Forward Bloc — have decided to take up the issue in Parliament with Kunal Ghosh as their target.

CPI(M) Rajya Sabha member Tapan Sen said besides demanding a law for regulating the activities of chit funds, the Left MPs will ask for strong penal actions against all those individuals responsible for hoodwinking thousands of people. "Not just Ghosh, we will demand action against all," Sen said.

Balurghat Lok Sabha MP Prasanta Kumar Majumdar (RSP) said the MPs would also demand a probe into Ghosh’s involvement in the affairs of Saradha Group.

“Besides raising the demand in the House, we will also organise agitations outside Parliament which will be decided by the Left Parties on Monday,” Majumdar said.